Spring RTS Engine

I need some bird models for World Builder. I've come up with a strategy for making such things roam around the gameworld, and I'd like to make a demonstration of this.

I'd like a hawk, some pigeons, and some seagulls. All should be modeled with wings that can flap- it's not essential that they can land, so don't worry about feet, if you don't want to. I'd strongly prefer stuff that was skinned, and try to keep polycounts at or below 500 triangles.

Wouldn't it be better to stick with sprite birds, especially flocks?

is it going to be seagulls fly over beaches or disturb trees and birds come out?

Wouldn't it be better to stick with sprite birds, especially flocks?

No, it'd look pretty crappy, imo. Besides which, then I'd need to write some giant flocking algorithm, instead of doing it a simpler way. That, and I don't want giant numbers of birds- just enough to add some motion and interest to a map.

is it going to be seagulls fly over beaches or disturb trees and birds come out?

It's definitely going to be about flying birds over various terrain at first, then maybe restricting them to specific terrain, then maybe some more "intelligent" patterns, like having trees where they "roost" or whatnot.

well until then cant you use flying fleas to demonstrate your script.

The birds in shogun total war were about 3 polies total and they looked fine. With a basic texture and good use of alpha I could imagine this being done fairly easily. They were spawned in large groups when you moved troops into a forest, and fluttered up into the air in a large group, hovered above there for a bit, and then disappeared.

I think what you're talking about is total overkill, in my opinion. I'd probably have something similar to the tree disturbance code, and then just randomly spawn a handful of birds from those positions every now and then which fly around for a bit and then disappear. You just need to glimpse them occasionally for the immersive effect. I'm sure there are much better uses of your time.

Is world builder gonna be a sort of map editor?

@Gota:

Um, it's a kind of feature-placement tool, plus a bunch of other things. It's really hard to explain in less than giant paragraphs, sorry. There was a thread about it back in January, and pretty much everything in it still applies. It was my first big Lua project, and it's really interesting, but I cba to describe it again short of the documentation I'm trying to write tonight, tbh, and the documentation won't be available until beta-testers have had a chance to look it over and ask me "stupid" questions until they know how to use it a bit themselves.

Is it gonna be user friendly?

TBH, I should probably just say, "I have no idea". I wrote it, and I know what it does, so I think it's very user-friendly. That's why I'm letting mappers beta-test it and hopefully give me assistance in making a decent manual.

You're free to use the Chicken Flier (Looks like a Pteradactyl) if you want something more alien.

Might want to size it down and give it one of the other textures (the flier is yellow) so people dont freak out when they see it.

That's a good thought, I may do that. Alien birds aren't a big problem, after all, this is sci-if...

I really hope itwill be user friendly.Otherwise it will be just another obstacle for the growth of the community..sinceonly few will eventually master it.
Notsaying were beter of of course.just that making it user firendly would add a lot of value to it.

yan, don't be a dick. It being there versus not at all is user friendly.

Battlefield 2 uses sprites for birds and they look fine.

"Sprites" as in, 5 double-sided quads? Or just plain sprites? I can see doing it with the former, but I think the latter's not really going to work well. At any rate, polycount's not a real issue anyhow, I'm not planning to have hundreds of them, just half a dozen or so. You really don't need a lot of random animals or whatnot to add a lot of life to a map, I've been finding.

Argh.how do u add sounds to a map?like say a storm soundtrack to a snow map?

Units are able to emit sounds in-game. My understanding (I may be wrong) of argh's worldbuilder is that units are being added that aren't 'features' but are neutral items as part of the gaia side. Therefore, they can have scripts, and can equally therefore emit sounds. That's how I figure it'll work anyway.

Argh.how do u add sounds to a map?like say a storm soundtrack to a snow map?

Well, you could do it like WZ is saying, and that's pretty easy (in SVN Spring).

Or you could do it all directly with a Lua program, that simply plays sounds at random locations every few seconds.

While you can certainly just do it with Units, and that was one of the reasons I built World Builder, if you just want some ambient sounds, it's very easy to do that with Lua, and I expect that will be a technique a lot of people use in the future.

For birds that are realistically sized there's no point doing anything more than sprites because they're going to look like sprites anyway at that size.